Alma Mahler - Posthumous Reputation

Posthumous Reputation

Shortly after her death, satirist Tom Lehrer wrote a song called "Alma" which centered on her role as wife and muse to three prominent artists. Like many Lehrer songs, the tone is irreverent, and paints her as a difficult, temperamental companion to the three work-absorbed artists.

In Mahler (1974) by director Ken Russell, Gustav Mahler while on his last train journey, remembers the important events of his life – his relationship with his wife, the death of his brother and of his young daughter, his trouble with the muses, and more. In the film, Alma was played by Georgina Hale, and Gustav was played by Robert Powell.

In 1996, Israeli writer Joshua Sobol and Austrian director Paulus Manker created the polydrama Alma. It played in Vienna for six successive seasons, and toured with over 400 performances to Venice, Lisbon, Los Angeles, Petronell, Berlin, Semmering, Jerusalem and Prague — all places where Mahler-Werfel had lived. The show was made into a three part mini TV-series in 1997. The scenes of Mahler Werfel's life were performed simultaneously on all floors and in all rooms of a special building. The guests were invited to abandon the immobilized position of a spectator in a conventional drama, replace it with the mobile activity of a traveller, and watch a "theatrical journey". Each audience member chose the events, the path, and the person to follow after each event, thus constructing her or his personal version of the "Polydrama."

Mohammed Fairouz set the words of Alma Mahler in his song cycle Jeder Mensch. It was premiered in a coupling with songs of Alma Mahler by mezzo-soprano Kate Lindsey in 2011.

A treatment of Mahler-Werfel's life is presented in the 2001 Bruce Beresford film Bride of the Wind. In the film, Alma was played by Australian actress Sarah Wynter. Gustav Mahler was portrayed by British actor Jonathan Pryce. Swiss actor Vincent Perez portrayed Oskar Kokoschka.

Martin Chervin wrote a one-woman play about her first marriage called Myself, Alma Mahler. In 1998 extracts from her diaries were published, covering the years from 1898 to 1902, up until the point she married Mahler. The 2001 novel The Artist's Wife by Max Phillips has her tell her own story from the afterlife, concentrating on her complicated relationships.

In 2010 the German filmmaker Percy Adlon and his son Felix Adlon released their film Mahler auf der Couch (Mahler on the Couch), which relates Gustav Mahler's tormented relationship with his wife Alma and his meeting with Sigmund Freud in 1910. In the film's introduction, the directors stated, "That it happened is fact. How it happened is fiction." In fact, the only source for the Mahler-Freud meeting is a one-page account in Ernest Jones' biography of Freud (Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, three volumes, 1953–1957, vol. 2, pp. 88–89, Basic Books, 1955; also in the abridged, one-volume edition, pp. 358–359, Basic Books, 1961).

Less amusing is the story of her two books on Mahler and their impact on 'Mahler studies'. As an articulate, well-connected and influential woman who outlived her first husband by more than 50 years, Mahler-Werfel was for decades the main authority on the mature Mahler's values, character and day-to-day behaviour, and her various publications quickly became the central source material for Mahler scholars and music-lovers alike. Unfortunately, as scholars investigated the picture she painted of Mahler and her relationship with him, her accounts have increasingly been revealed as unreliable, false and misleading. Nevertheless, the deliberate distortions have had a significant influence upon several generations of scholars, interpreters and music-lovers. Citing the serious contradictions between Alma's accounts and other evidence, including her own diaries, several historians and biographers have begun to speak of the "Alma Problem". According to Hugh Wood,

"Often she is the only witness, and the biographer has to depend on her while doubting with every sentence her capacity for telling the truth. Everything that passed through her hands must be regarded as tainted"